Five Percent: Conserve Energy

The “Clear Skies” Initiative and the “Healthy Forests” Act are some of the more glaring euphemisms of the Bush administration. They also worked their magic with “cut and run” and “climate change” (sometimes known as global warming). One message of the 2006 elections was that we see through some of these words (yes, just as we saw through Clinton’s lie about “that woman”).

We should stand up and call something what it is. We need not come up with over-statements, or under-statements, or mis-statements to describe something: we seem to have said that, as a nation, we are able to discern what a thing is, on its face.

Let’s call an SUV an SUV. (more…)

Perhaps it sounds strange that I haven’t seen An Inconvenient Truth yet. My wife saw it the week it came out, but I didn’t. I watched it tonight on DVD, finally. I know a lot of what’s in the movie — several years of casual investigation, reading, thinking and action have caused me to come across what this movie presents in one form or another. But what I learned from the movie was not so much about the facts, but about how we respond to crises.

The first is that we (people) are very reluctant to change what appears to be a good thing. Indeed, we don’t just fail to act, we tend to act rather forcefully to deny the existence of the problem. Then, after a while, we conclude “it’s too late” or rationalize our lack of action in some way or other.

If we follow this course, the problem “solves itself”, usually in a way that provides the worst outcome for those who had the most to gain from solving it actively. I’m human and do these things on a daily basis in my life and work. It’s the way many, if not all of us are. Gore talks about his father’s decision to finally give up tobacco farming … only after his daughter, Gore’s sister, died of lung cancer. We’re all a little like this.

But change can happen. (more…)

As I was trolling around, I came across a page from the Briggs & Stratton website: you need to use different gas in a snowblower than in a lawnmower … because gasoline sold in winter is formulated to combust at a lower temperature. So if you must, make sure you buy gas in November or later for Winter.

But must you? (more…)

Last year around this time I tried a dimmable R-40 floodlight that didn’t really work. On the advice of a commenter on that post, I ordered some Greenlite R40 23W dimmable floods and they are a very good replacement for our incandescent R40 floodlights. (more…)

Sometimes it’s easy to see that your tires need more air, but it’s far from obvious in many cases. We recently noticed a drop in mileage in Theresa’s car, and I was ready to chalk it up to different gasoline composition in winter that reduces mileage. But I noticed one of Theresa’s car’s tires was noticeably low, so we filled it up. As it turned out, all the tires were under-inflated, even the ones that looked fine.

Then, one cold day I noticed a tire symbol on my dashboard. I thought it was the below-freezing warning light, but I read the manual, and it turned out my car was telling me my tire pressure was low. I have no idea how it knows that, but it was right (I believe my Prius is smarter than I am), so I pumped up my tires.

So check your tire pressure. Both cars are getting significantly better mileage after this simple effort!

Cold weather is a cause of lower tire pressure (and other other things that reduce mileage). (more…)

Yes, you heard it here first: a Prius with only a modest sized, fresh cut tree maxes out at around 25 MPG at highway speeds.

As I drove along watching the average mileage in the mid to high 40′s get hammered, I was mortified (good thing we used Theresa’s Prius, not mine :-). But then, I realized that we were now getting the same mileage as … the average car. (more…)

If one person has one opinion and another has a different opinion things can come out two ways:

1. The two can accept one opinion over the other, whether through logic, rhetoric, judgment, law, or force, or
2. The two can arrive at a stale-mate, leaving the disagreement unresolved.

Disagreements happen at all levels: personal, corporate, tribal, national. Many of our institutions have arisen to find ways to settle, that is to resolve the dispute. Some are elegant, like science. Public discourse resolves some issues. Some are civil but not always correct, such as law. Then, there’s war. But resolving the differences between two opinions is always a lot of work.

If you’re losing, and don’t want resolution, obstruction is a simple and effective tactic. But when it’s our elected officers obstructing in a calculated, determined way, it’s just organized crime. (more…)

I started this blog in October 2005, and we started picking the low-hanging fruit of our consumption by November. Over the course of the year we have made a lot of little changes (and some big ones). Our first attack was changing a few obvious light bulbs to compact fluorescent, and a few others, as I reported in November’s Electric Bill (2005). We started seeing them add up, and as they add up, the change continue to be remarkable.

Our electricity consumption for November 2005 was about 20% less than the same period in 2004. According to our current bill, we used 801 Kwh of electricity in 11/2005, and 588 in 11/2006. Yeah, that’s right, we have saved an additional 27% year over year. It’s simply amazing to me what can happen when little changes add up.

Rock on (and turn the lights off!)